ABC to expand digital media - Murdoch pissed off :)

Very interesting. It seems that the new direction of the ABC is a slap in the face for pay TV. And it will be all free. Murdoch must be absolutely livid. Looks like the ABC has outsmarted the gov.....*evil laugh*

To lose 10% of his staff and more than $50m a year for five years, plus the one off whack of $120m from the May budget, presents opportunities for Scott, aside from the despair. 

The managing director has seized them. It’s digital all the way, largely at the expense of traditional regional services across the wide, brown land. 

That is an uppercut right to the chin for regional viewers and listeners, who might reasonably be expected to be Coalition supporters. Mainstream media businesses will also feel the blow, as they scramble to move their content and customers from print to digital. 

Arguably, one of the biggest pains in the ABC’s neck is the infantile carping from News Corp. The Murdochs have been belting out the same chorus against public broadcasters for years. Who can forget James Murdoch’s 2009 MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh, where he denounced the BBC’s “land grab”? 

Of course, for the ABC to announce a massive expansion of its digital business, all of it free to consumers, is one in the eye for a national commercial operator trying to build an online news business behind a paywall.

 ................... 

His investment in the broadcaster’s digital services is driving News Corp bonkers, which is delightful to observe. The spluttering indignation in the Australia’s editorial was the main amusement of the morning. 

“Mark Scott’s strategic statement on the future of the ABC yesterday was a political stunt by a failing technocrat who is out of his depth as editor-in-chief of the national broadcaster,” the paper opined. 

His sin is the expansion of the ABC’s digital services, something News Corp and Fairfax regard as their own private turf. There’s nothing worse than publicly-funded competition. more